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By Root 2144 0

pounding of his heart. (He might find himself on the filthy floor of one of the shut-up rooms at Cross Hill, or in the spear-like grass of the lawn, unable to recall how he’d gotten where he was. Sometimes one of us was stooped over him, crying, “Graeme, wake up! Graeme, please wake up!”) As Graeme’s insomnia worsened, his perverse pride in it increased. He could not trust the night for sleep; he could not trust the day. How he wished he could go on-line, to boast to his invisible friends in cyberspace that he, unlike the rest of them, no longer slept. He reveled in the fact that Mother, sunk in upon herself, indifferent now to her children, hadn’t the slightest awareness of his morbid condition; nor did Father seem to be concerned, except to address him ironically at the dinner table when his head nodded or he failed to reply to a question directed at him. ("Son, I’m speaking to you. Where is your mind?” Father would ask; and Graeme would labor to bring back his mind, his consciousness, as a boy might tug timidly at a favorite kite blown high into the sky by an unpredictable wind with the power to tear it to shreds at any moment. My mind! My mind! Father, here it is!)

Yet to be isolated, accursed—that was to know himself special.

Graeme had ceased to believe that our father might be “redeemed"—that “justice” would be executed. He’d ceased to have faith that we would ever be returned to our old lives in the city; he’d ceased to believe that our “old lives” had ever existed, in fact. As cyberspace, in which he’d spent so many hours of his young life, exists everywhere, but also nowhere. And nowhere must predominate. The final law of nature.

Now that Mother had been broken by Cross Hill, now that Father had more obsessively retreated to his quarters at the top of the house (forbidden, as the master bedroom was forbidden, for us children to approach), there came to be a prevailing mood of confusion in the household; like that aftermath of shock, yet a silent, undefined shock, following the passage of a powerful jet plane overhead. It was August; a time of intense, sweltering heat; a time of tremulous, quavering heat; and frequent thunderstorms, and lightning; a time of frequent electric failures, when the inadequate wiring at Cross Hill broke down completely and darkness might be protracted for hours. One day we realized that Mr. and Mrs. Dulne had ceased to come to the house; we seemed to know that the couple hadn’t been paid in weeks and had given up hoping to be compensated for their work. Mother explained in a blank, indifferent voice, as if she were commenting upon the weather, “They will receive payment. Father will write them a check. In time.” But when? we asked. (We were ashamed that this kindly older couple, who’d been so gracious to us, might be cheated.) But Mother merely smiled and shrugged. Since the “betrayal” of the breakfast room, as she’d come to call it, she’d withdrawn from emotion. Not Mother now, Graeme thought bitterly. Then who?

Ironically, Father’s important visitors hadn’t shown up that morning. He’d waited through the day for them, and it was one of our longest August days. He’d waited calmly at first, in a newly pressed blue-pinstripe seersucker suit, white shirt and tie, glancing through documents neatly arranged in stacks on the cherrywood table; then with growing agitation he’d waited at the front entrance of Cross Hill, beneath its mossy, discolored neoclassic portico; as the hours passed, and the whitely steaming sun moved lethargically through the sky, he grew calm again, with a look of ironic resignation; staring across the grassy acreage in the direction of the front gate like one who hears distant music inaudible to others and, at last, inaudible to the listener himself.

It was a mid-August night, gauzily moonlit, when Graeme decided to follow his brother Stephen; to lie in wait for Stephen outdoors in the marshy grass at the foot of the drive. He seemed to know that Stephen was slipping away from Cross Hill by night, in secret, on his bicycle; disobeying Father’s admonition that no